BellaOnline Forums Family Special Needs Children Safety and Civil Rights in Institutions - CRIPA

... In the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department announced settlements in six cases involving the civil rights and physical safety of people in mental hospitals, institutions and nursing homes.

Disability rights organizations are now challenging those settlements. They say the hurried agreements fail to protect the civil rights of people living in institutions, and don�t require states to assure that institutions meet even basic standards of care.

Their suspicion: that states hurried to reach agreements with the Bush administration because they feared more robust enforcement efforts by the Obama administration. ...

... the Justice Department can intervene to make state-run institutions comply with civil rights laws. The statute is known as CRIPA � the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division enforces the law against mental institutions, nursing homes, prisons and jails that don't meet basic standards of care.

Government records show that in the last month before President Bush left office, the Justice Department reached six CRIPA settlements. Five of those were issued during his last week in office. The Justice Department has not released comprehensive statistics in this area, but people who work in the field say six CRIPA settlements in a month is a huge number for the Bush administration. The agreements span the country: Hawaii, Washington state, South Carolina, Tennessee, Connecticut and Georgia.

... Margo Schlanger, who used to work on CRIPA cases as a Justice Department attorney and is now a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, also reviewed the six agreements at NPR's request.

"There are a lot of things about these settlements that are nonstandard," said Schlanger. Some have very short timelines � as little as two years for a state to fix deep-seated problems. And if the states don't fix the problems, Schlanger said, "these are agreements that expire regardless of what the defendant does."